A History of Science — Volume 5

by Henry Smith Williams; Edward Huntington Williams

But the "stranger" must not leave the building without mounting to the upper floor for an inspection of the library and reading-room. The rooms below were rather bare and inornate, contrasting unfavorably with the elegant meeting-room of the French institute. But this library makes full amends for anything that the other rooms may lack. It is one of the most charming—"enchanting" is the word that the Princess Christian is said to have used when she visited it recently—and perhaps quite the most inspiring room to be found in all London. It is not very large as library rooms go, but high, and with a balcony supported by Corinthian columns. The alcoves below are conventional enough, and the high tables down the centre, strewn with scientific periodicals in engaging disorder, are equally conventional. But the color-scheme of the decorations—sage-green and tawny—is harmonious and pleasing, and the effect of the whole is most reposeful and altogether delightful.

Chief distinction is given the room, however, by a row of busts on either side and by certain pieces of apparatus on the centre tables.

The busts, as will readily be surmised, are portraits of distinguished fellows of the Royal Society. There is, however, one exception to this, for one bust is that of a woman—Mary Somerville, translator of the Mécanique Céleste, and perhaps the most popular of the scientific writers of her time. It is almost superfluous to state that the row of busts begins with that of Newton. The place of honor opposite is held by that of Faraday. Encircling the room to join these two one sees, among others, the familiar visages of Dr. Gilbert; of Sir Joseph Banks, the famous surgeon of the early nineteenth century, who had the honor of being the only man that ever held the presidential chair of the Royal Society longer than it was held by Newton; of James Watts, of "steam-engine" fame; of Sabine, the astronomer, also a president of the society; and of Dr. Falconer and Sir Charles Lyell, the famous geologists.

There are numerous other busts in other rooms, some of them stowed away in nooks and crannies, and the list of those selected for the library does not, perhaps, suggest that this is the room of honor, unless, indeed, the presence of Newton and Faraday gives it that stamp. But in the presence of the images of these two, and of Lyell, to go no farther, one feels a certain sacredness in the surroundings.

If this is true of the mere marble images, what shall we say of the emblems on the centre table? That little tubular affair, mounted on a globe, the whole cased in a glass frame perhaps two feet high, is the first reflecting telescope ever made, and it was shaped by the hand of Isaac Newton. The brass mechanism at the end of the next table is the perfected air-pump of Robert Boyle, Newton's contemporary, one of the founders of the Royal Society and one of the most acute scientific minds of any time. And here between these two mementos is a higher apparatus, with crank and wheel and a large glass bulb that make it conspicuous. This is the electrical machine of Joseph Priestley. There are other mementos of Newton—a stone graven with a sun-dial, which he carved as a boy, on the paternal manor-house; a chair, said to have been his, guarded here by a silk cord against profanation; bits of the famous apple-tree which, as tradition will have it, aided so tangibly in the greatest of discoveries; and the manuscript of the Principia itself—done by the hand of an amanuensis, to be sure, but with interlinear corrections in the small, clear script of the master-hand itself. Here, too, is the famous death-mask, so much more interesting than any sculptured portrait, and differing so strangely in its broad-based nose and full, firm mouth from the over-refined lineaments of the sculptured bust close at hand. In a room not far away, to reach which one passes a score or two of portraits and as many busts of celebrities—including, by-the-bye, both bust and portrait of Benjamin Franklin—one finds a cabinet containing other mementos similar to those on the library tables. Here is the first model of Davy's safety-lamp; there a chronometer which aided Cook in his famous voyage round the world. This is Wollaston's celebrated "Thimble Battery." It will slip readily into the pocket, yet he jestingly showed it to a visitor as "his entire laboratory." That is a model of the double-decked boat made by Sir William Petty, and there beyond is a specimen of almost, if not quite, the first radiometer devised by Sir William Crookes.

As one stands in the presence of all these priceless relics, so vividly do the traditions of more than two centuries of science come to mind that one seems almost to have lived through them. One recalls, as if it were a personal recollection, the founding of the Royal Society itself in 1662, and the extraordinary scenes which the society witnessed during the years of its adolescence.

As one views the mementos of Boyle and Newton, one seems to be living in the close of the seventeenth century. It is a troublous time in England. Revolution has followed revolution. Commonwealth has supplanted monarchy and monarchy commonwealth. At last the "glorious revolution" of 1688 has placed a secure monarch on the throne. But now one external war follows another, and the new king, William of Orange, is leading the "Grand Alliance" against the French despot Louis XIV. There is war everywhere in Europe, and the treaty of Ryswick, in 1697, is but the preparation for the war of the Spanish Alliance, which will usher in the new century. But amid all this political turmoil the march of scientific discovery has gone serenely on; or, if not serenely, then steadily, and perhaps as serenely as could be hoped. Boyle has discovered the law of the elasticity of gases and a host of minor things. Robert Hooke is on the track of many marvels. But all else pales before the fact that Newton has just given to the world his marvellous law of gravitation, which has been published, with authority of the Royal Society, through the financial aid of Halley. The brilliant but erratic Hooke lias contested the priority of discovery and strenuously claimed a share in it. Halley eventually urges Newton to consider Hooke's claim in some of the details, and Newton yields to the extent of admitting that the great fact of gravitational force varying inversely as the square of the distance had been independently discovered by Hooke; but he includes also Halley himself and Sir Christopher Wren, along with Hooke, as equally independent discoverers of the same principle. To the twentieth-century consciousness it seems odd to hear Wren thus named as a scientific discoverer; but in truth the builder of St. Paul's began life as a professor of astronomy at Gresham College, and was the immediate predecessor of Newton himself in the presidential chair of the Royal Society. Now, at the very close of the seventeenth century, Boyle is recently dead, but Hooke, Wren, Halley, and Newton still survive: some of them are scarcely past their prime. It is a wonderful galaxy of stars of the first magnitude, and even should no other such names come in after-time, England's place among the scientific constellations is secure.

But now as we turn to the souvenirs of Cooke and Wollaston and Davy the scene shifts by a hundred years. We are standing now in the closing epoch of the eighteenth century. These again are troublous times. The great new colony in the West has just broken off from the parent swarm. Now all Europe is in turmoil. The French war-cloud casts its ominous shadow everywhere. Even in England mutterings of the French Revolution are not without an echo. The spirit of war is in the air. And yet, as before, the spirit of science also is in the air. The strain of the political relations does not prevent a perpetual exchange of courtesy between scientific men and scientific bodies of various nations. Davy's dictum that "science knows no country" is perpetually exemplified in practice. And at the Royal Society, to match the great figures that were upon the scene a century before, there are such men as the eccentric Cavendish, the profound Wollaston, the marvellously versatile Priestley, and the equally versatile and even keener-visioned Rumford. Here, too, are Herschel, who is giving the world a marvellous insight into the constitution of the universe; and Hutton, who for the first time gains a clear view of the architecture of our earth's crust; and Jenner, who is rescuing his fellow-men from the clutches of the most deadly of plagues; to say nothing of such titanic striplings as Young and Davy, who are just entering the scientific lists. With such a company about us we are surely justified in feeling that the glory of England as a scientific centre has not dimmed in these first hundred and thirty years of the Royal Society's existence.

And now, as we view the radiometer, the scene shifts by yet another century, and we come out of cloud-land and into our own proper age. We are at the close of the nineteenth century—no, I forget, we are fairly entering upon the twentieth. Need I say that these again are troublous times? Man still wages warfare on his fellow-man as he has done time out of mind; as he will do—who shall say how long? But meantime, as of yore, the men of science have kept steadily on their course. But recently here at the Royal Society were seen the familiar figures of Darwin and Lyell and Huxley and Tyndall. Nor need we shun any comparison with the past while the present lists can show such names as Wallace, Kelvin, Lister, Crookes, Foster, Evans, Rayleigh, Ramsay, and Lock-yer. What revolutionary advances these names connote! How little did those great men of the closing decades of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries know of the momentous truths of organic evolution for which the names of Darwin and Wallace and Huxley stand! How little did they know a century ago, despite Hutton's clear prevision, of these marvellous slow revolutions through which, as Lyell taught us, the earth's crust had been built up! Not even Jen-ner could foresee a century ago the revolution in surgery which has been effected in our generation through the teachings of Lister.

And what did Rumford and Davy know of energy in its various manifestations as compared with the knowledge of to-day, of Crookes and Rayleigh and Ramsay and Kelvin? What would Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, and Cavendish, the discoverer of nitrogen, think could they step into the laboratory of Professor Ramsay and see test-tubes containing argon and helium and krypton and neon and zenon? Could they more than vaguely understand the papers contributed in recent years to the Royal Society, in which Professor Ramsay explains how these new constituents of the atmosphere are obtained by experiments on liquid air. "Here," says Professor Ramsay, in effect, in a late paper to the society, "is the apparatus with which we liquefy hydrogen in order to separate neon from helium by liquefying the former while the helium still remains gaseous." Neon, helium, liquid air, liquid hydrogen—these would seem strange terms to the men who on discovering oxygen and nitrogen named them "dephlogisticated air" and "phlogisti-cated air" respectively.